Ye (formerly Kanye West) is facing another lawsuit accusing him of illegal sampling, this time over claims he incorporated a track into two songs from Doda even after being expressly denied permission.
The suit, filed Wednesday (July 17) in Los Angeles federal court, alleges Ye borrowed elements from a song called “MSD PT2” for his own “Hurricane” and “Moon” — which also reached the two in the top 20 on the Hot 100 when released in 2021.
Filed by a company that owns the rights to the earlier song, the suit alleges that when he was denied permission to use it, he simply “decided to steal it.”
“This lawsuit is about more than the defendants' inability to pay a fee,” he writes Oren Varsavsky and other attorneys from the BakerHostetler law firm, representing the plaintiffs. “This is about the rights of artists, musicians and songwriters to determine how their works are published and used. “Intellectual property owners have the right to decide how their property is exploited and should be able to prevent shameless infringers from simply stealing.”
In an act of particularly “blatant audacity,” the lawsuit alleges that Ye even credited the song's four creators — Khalil Abdul-Rahman Hazzard, Sam Barsh, Dan Seeff and Josh Mease — as songwriters despite their refusal to collaborate with him .
Wednesday's case was not filed by the artists themselves, but by a company called Artist Revenue Advocates (ARA), which owns the copyright to “MSD PT2.” The company's lawyers say the four artists turned to ARA after “unsuccessfully trying to collect their share of the revenue from these songs” for nearly three years.
A representative for Ye could not immediately be reached for comment on the new case.
The new allegations come less than a month after Ye settled a separate lawsuit filed by the estate of Donna Summer over a very similar charge. In that earlier case, Summer's estate claimed the rapper had used her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” on his “Good (Don't Die)” despite the same express denial.
“The Summer estate … wanted nothing to do with West's controversial history and specifically rejected West's proposed use,” attorneys for the estate wrote at the time. “In the face of this rejection, the defendants arrogantly and unilaterally decided that they would simply steal 'I Feel Love' and use it without permission.”
Even before the two recent cases, Ye has been repeatedly sued for unclear samples and interference in his music.
In 2022, Ye was sued claiming that his song “Life of the Party” illegally sampled a song by the pioneering rap group Boogie Down Productions. was indicted in another case over allegations that he used an undisclosed excerpt of Marshall Jefferson's 1986 track “Move Your Body” in the song “Flowers”; and was sued in a separate case by a Texas pastor over an alleged sample from his recorded sermon on “Come to Life'.
Prior to that, West and Pusha T were sued in 2019 for sampling George Jackson's “I Can't Do Without You” on the track “Come Back Baby.” That same year, he was sued for allegedly using an audio clip of a young girl praying in his 2016 song “Ultralight Beam.” Back in the day, West was hit with similar lawsuits over alleged unlicensed samples used on “New Slaves.” , “Bound 2” and “My Joy”.
